Thursday 25 August 2011 06.51 EDT
First published on Thursday 25 August 2011 06.51 EDT

You have to feel for Research In Motion. After months of near-constant negative headlines around the company's BlackBerry devices, it has just unveiled a genuinely innovative new music service built on top of its crown jewel: the BBM messaging app. And yet the unveiling happened just as Apple CEO Steve Jobs resigned, sucking the blogosphere's attention and energy away from any other technology story.

BBM Music deserves to regain some of that attention though: it has plenty of potential, and is far from a me-too rival to popular music services like iTunes, Spotify and Pandora.

Powered by British music services firm Omnifone, it has licences from all four major labels in the bag in time for the launch today of its closed beta in the UK, US and Canada, with a global rollout to follow later this year in those countries plus Australia, Columbia, France, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Spain, Thailand, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.

The basic facts: BBM Music will be a subscription service costing $4.99 a month in the US, although how that converts elsewhere in the world has yet to be announced. Users will choose 50 songs from the BBM Music catalogue for their profiles, which can be used to create playlists, and cached locally on their BlackBerry smartphone for offline listening.

50 songs? That's not much, but this is where the BBM angle kicks in. Users will also be able to access the 50 songs of any of their BBM contacts who subscribe to the service. That means a theoretical choice of 100 songs if one friend signs up, 200 songs if three do, and 2,000 songs if 39 do. And so on.

RIM has not given details of any upper limit, but in an interview with BerryReview, senior project manager Nick Patsiopoulos says "during the beta the BBM Music connections is limited to 140 BBM Music contacts until launch but it can scale past there". Licensing agreements are likely to be the key factor in whatever ceiling is eventually set.

The BBM Music app itself is built around an activity stream of the songs friends are adding to their profiles, as well as the friends they are sharing those tracks with, and the playlists they are creating. Users can comment on one another's songs, and fire up full BBM chats from within the application.

The app also ties into Amazon's MP3 music store to buy and download tracks beyond the 50-song limit, with the choice of partner being slightly surprising, given RIM's previously close relationship with British firm 7Digital.

BBM Music is interesting and genuinely disruptive in the wider scheme of music services. An addressable user base of 45 million BBM users is a strong base to start from, although BBM Music is more likely to appeal to BlackBerry's younger customers rather than its business users.

There are some pitfalls in store. First: will those younger users be willing to pay for a subscription music service, even if it is tied into BBM? Second: how will it stack up to competition from other streaming services which offer desktop as well as mobile access, with no 50-song limit? RIM's launch of its BBM Social API means those services can build BBM into their own BlackBerry apps, after all.

Perhaps most importantly, BBM Music's success will be tied to the overall performance of RIM itself. It's a bold and innovative move, but its long-term prospects will depend on the success of the current wave of BlackBerry 7 OS handsets, but more importantly on how next year's new generation of devices running RIM's QNX software perform.

RIM's challenge remains proving that it can halt its sliding market share against fierce competition from iPhone and Android, but at least BBM Music shows its strategy is not just about playing catch-up.